Is working a spook or am I just fucking lazy...

When I was a NEET I believed the opposite. Now that I've experienced wage-slavery, and the futility, tedium, and utter meaninglessness of the work, I've done a complete 180 on the issue.
Work nowadays is just slavery. It doesn't contribute anything other than returns for your boss. If you're a social service worker, or an artist, or a scientist, or are in some other profession such as those, then its a different story of course.

This but minus the trust-fund part

>If you're a social service worker, or an artist, or a scientist, or are in some other profession such as those, then its a different story of course.

Then get one of those jobs lmayo

>waaahh i took the coward's route after high school and did a diploma in business and now i work as a bean counter in an office waaahh wahhhh why did society do this to me

fucking LMAO-ing at your life

Nah it'll just be an eternal weekend where people can pursue their interests.

No one has interests what hte fuck

To be fair, non of those jobs should actually be "jobs", and the current economic system greatly jeopardizes their integrity and conclusions. Take private care homes for instance, if you're a social worker, you'll find many such places that don't give any regard toward the well-being of their patients, and take any measures necessary to reduce costs, even at the expense of the patients safety and treatment, if there is any treatment to speak of.
The sciences are also a victim of this, and have grown increasingly sensationalized, both impacting their areas of study, and their methods of operation.
I don't think I need to say anything about the negatives of art being a commodity.

In a way, I think work (or at least struggle, resistance, building, etc.) is what makes us better as humans, and at least on the personal level. On the one hand, building and producing gives us something bigger than ourselves to invest in and focus on, and, on the other hand, getting out the comfort zone and experiencing resistance and struggle makes us stronger.

On a social level, work can make us focus only on ourselves and our own path and struggles. This can be isolating from the people around us. There's also a matter of status and luxury that can come with enough hard work, that creates a whole new set of problems.

>tfw dropped out of high school

Which will only make us slovenly and apathetic. At some point, pursuit of leisure will take the place or pursuit of interests.

I've been thinking about this as well

You're conflating a whole host of concepts here. OP is specifically talking about work in a professional capacity. i.e. jobs. You perform a task and are economically compensated for it. In the absence of such a system there's nothing stopping people from performing "work" as you're describing it. If anything, more people would be free to pursue such activities.

You should read Veblen. And then you should read Kaczynski. But focus on Veblen.

Define "leisure." I don't think "leisure" and the "pursuit of interests" are mutually exclusive.

bup

It's simple

burger flipping < NEETing < actual professional career that allows you to grow over decades and interact with intelligent and motivated people that you can learn from

>With the way technology is advancing, it is conceivable that most work will be automated.
This meme needs to die already.

>hey guys just wanted to demonstrate to everyone that I never read Thoreau kthxbye

basic income and eventually technocommunism is the only sound way in a world where machines are doing all the labour.

Work (meaning being a wagecuck) is definitely a spook.

It's not really a meme, 85% of low probability work and 15% of high probability work is already vulnerable. There's also the problem that most of the jobs fields aren't even profitable with out automation.

This is an interesting question, especially for anarchist thinkers.

The most mainline argument goes something like this: yes, we truly live under Adam’s curse. We must toil for our bread. Yet, technology has advanced to the point where we can provide for everyone’s basic necessities: food, housing, clothing, medical care, education, etc. So why does most of the world’s population live in abject poverty? One answer is that, in direct contradiction to capitalist propaganda, our neoliberal system is extremely irrational and inefficient. This manifests itself in numerous ways, for instance in reproducing what Graeber calls, “bullshit jobs.” Really, what should be happening is that economies should shed bullshit jobs, redirect economies to the production of necessities, and allow people to otherwise have leisure time to read or spend with their family or their church or friends or whatever. The question arises: well, what would stop some people from getting jobs as scientists and others as janitors? Well, if everyone would participate in the upkeep of communities, and if nobody wanted to clean toilets, then technologies would be created to make cleaning toilets easier and faster. And this isn’t just anarchist propaganda. The economist John Maynard Keynes thought that we would be working 15 hour weeks by now. The only reason we aren’t is because economies are designed to make a few people rich, not serve the needs and wellbeing of flesh and blood humans. m.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o

I should add that besides bullshit jobs, there are entire bullshit industries, or at the most generous, industries that were once needed but have gotten out of control and have become a burden to society. In the US context, this includes the two largest segments of our economy: finance, which has begun to cannibalize the productive economy, and the war machine, which gobbles up more than half of federal discretionary spending. If more resources were directed toward people and the productive economy and away from these parasitic industries, society would have a decent amount of leisure time.

A real job is in an industry you are passionate about. Then it really isn't """work""". Git gud at whatever you are genuinely interested in and go from there. If you have no genuine interests, become a better person.

>am i just lazy
Laziness is a spook, just as work is.

most work isn't really work it's just daycare for 90% of society, something to distract them and a guide to their lives

>thinks culture is a meme
>thinks spooks are a meme
>thinks dfw isn't a meme
lel, phew lad, ur a fuckin BAGUETTE

Read the part about spectacular time; modern time being broken down into empty, homogenous units combined with the pseudo-cyclical time of everyday allowing the temporal commodification of 'experiences' in time off work.

If by pursuits of interest you mean fetishistic cult impulse tied to phantasmagoria, then yay I guess

how are you eating then? Because unless you're out here hunting fowl or catching fish and sleeping in some sort of shelter you made yourself you're participating in society bud, only from a taker position. Your parents work to feed you or your taking from the government or your stealing, all of which is parasitic. You're either in or your out, and I very much doubt your out.

The short answer is that if everyone had to clean toilets, then we would prioritize the creation of toilet cleaning technology. But the reality is that because there is enough of a labor pool so that hiring a person to clean a toilet is cheaper than developing toilet cleaning technology, toilet cleaning technology will not be developed.

Is question though is, is this fair? I would argue that it’s not. Now, I’m not saying that being a janitor isn’t a perfectly respectable job. In fact, a recent study found that a janitor contributes more to the economy than a financial sector employee working in the City of London, whose work is destructive to the real economy. The reason that not having toilet cleaning technology is unfair is that a janitor who now spends 8 hours cleaning toilets could, with better technology, clean the same toilets in half that time with the right technology and have an extra 4 hours to himself.

Now, you might argue that this janitor is being “underproductive” by not working a whole 8 hours, but this begs the question of, what is labor and what is being productive? What is that janitor spent his extra 4 hours a day with his son, making sure he doesn’t join a gang and engage in crime? Or what if he cares for his elderly parents? Or what if he spent some time reading, cultivating a sensitivity for the importance of caring for his son and parents? Is this not “being productive“? Really, a huge reason this isn’t considered “being productive” is because a lot of this kind of labor is considered “women’s work.” We would be far better off in society if we reconsidered the definitions of labor and productive work, and the importance of leisure time to develop values, creativity and social bonds.

David Graeber has a lot of interesting thoughts on why we have lots of technology to spy on people or kill them, but not a lot of technology that improves the lives of regular people. m.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgSJkk1tng

>thinks people love or care about anything

Art sure can be a commodity buddy, all those paintings have to fill walls somehow

Of course it's a spook. You're *literally* renting yourself out, unless you're fortunate enough to know the right people.

Try speaking in English next time.

Yeah except most people you will interact with during your professional career will be depressingly retarded/simple-minded/short-sighted/etc.

Working itself is not a spook you ignoramus. The idea that capitalist wage slavery is "noble" or "necessary" is the spook. Express yourself clearly, for fuck's sake

That's a pretty good way or putting it and aligns with my experience. Corporate jobs are designed for the lowest common denominator.

>he enjoys working for 7 euro/h in a menial job just to feed himself and get kicked in the groin after the company "restructure his debt" aka "fire him without notice" after a global economic downturn
wew lad

welcome to /spk/ - spook general

I'm actually an AI researcher and I'm curious why you think this is a meme. You realize jobs like journalism, programming, and hell even academic research are all being automated as we speak, right? If you think it's just the assembly line workers and uber drivers that are getting replaced you're sadly mistaken.

If you think you can just become something artistic like a creative writer or composer those fields are becoming automated too.

I'm not one of the kooks who believes in a singularity since there's no actual evidence for it besides wild speculation, and current machine learning models have a lot of problems, but a huge chunk of careers are going to be completely replaced by robots and AI in the next 50-100 years. I'm honestly not sure how much will be left for humans to do. I'm sure the John Henry's of the world will try to drive stakes for as long as they can but they're all going to die out.

you forgot marketing. It's entiry purpose is to make the system more inefficient

>We would be far better off in society if we reconsidered the definitions of labor and productive work, and the importance of leisure time to develop values, creativity and social bonds.

This is totally true. I'm not against leisure, nor do I think that people should live for work. But I can't help but think that when most people become excited about technology doing the menial jobs, that it's not meaningful leisure that they have in mind, but something much, much lower.

Have you actually listened to the music composed by AI? It's fucking garbage. Maybe when an artificial intelligence can produce a piece of music like it can produce a car, I'll buy into this argument

The solution: Strive for something that excites you

Guys I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to become a monk but I'm stuck wageslaving and in debt what do?

Pretentious as fuck.

People would work on their hobbies, make art, go backpacking, learn new skills and fields, participate in various communities, whatever they wanted to spend their time on.

Of all the things to be worried about the future, this is least of our problems.

>im too poor to give up all my possessions and become an ascetic

that's why I mentioned debt. i can't give away my debt. otherwise i possess very little already

Not him, but do you understand the concept of a "vacation"? This is an example of what Debord is talking about, when he refers to pseudo-cyclical time as the composite of irreversible and purely cyclical time. Leisure (vacation) is commodified as the necessary complement to work (vocation). "Free time" is defined by its relation to commodity production. I don't understand what's difficult to grasp about this.

I mean, some people will continue to do "whatever they want to spend their time on" regardless of the dominant ideological system of the normies, but if we're talking about the average person, you better believe the main reason they take a vacation is a vague feeling of malaise coupled with the admonition of their boss that they've "been working a lot, and should take some vacation time."

nigga if you're homeless and penniless what are they gonna do? there's no such thing as debtor's prison anymore.

You can always leave the country

that would be theft

We're talking about an automated world where jobs are no longer necessary. The concepts of vacation and vocation would be anachronisms.

What people foremost need is satisfaction and meaning. That can be achieved by working on what you like, self-improvement, meeting challenges, among many other things.

never gonna make it with that attitude

Good goy.

Don;t think of things as spooks or not spooks; it's better to conceive "spookhood" as a position which something may or may not take. Certain things are necessarily not spooks though (The Ego, etc).

But "jobs" aren't necessary now. If we organized efficiently, the amount of work each person would have to do would be drastically reduced. The system of organization in which automation is currently situated is capable of perpetuating itself in spite of how much activity is actually needed to accomplish an end. This can be seen in how many people are able to simply fuck around at work nowadays, especially in the service industry, which produces intangible commodities. When all tangible commodities are produced by machines, human wage slaves will be left only one variety, the intangible, which entails servitude on the basis that the means of production would still be legally in the hands of a few bourgeois. I anticipate a future of rampant sex tourism, and open prostitution.

Again, this isn't to say it couldn't change overnight, if the workers decided to take back their brains from the screens. But most people don't have the fortitude to do this, and very likely never will. This is the problem with dialectic materialism.

Maybe reduced, but many jobs are still necessary. Particularly the vital, unglamorous work of maintaining all the infrastructure we've built up. Though if you have a bullshit retail job that'll give you a different perspective of things.

Eventually we will reach a point where automation and AI is so sophisticated and ubiquitous that only a small minority of highly intelligent, creative people will still be working. Ideally, a UBI system will be in place to enable people to benefit from the vast abundance these technologies will create. People will then live as they wish, up until superintelligent AI emerges then who knows.

Resorting to cliched namecalling has no effect on the contemporary NEET. We are economic auto-didacts, self-taught philosophers and gifted visionaries. While others waste their life labouring under the orders of those who see only material cost in life, we pursue leisure above all else, knowing as we do that leisure and time to oneself is the basis of genius. Despite many people disliking the culture and society they help maintain through their work, and despite understanding now that we have only a single life on earth and that any meaning we attribute to it as the result of self-willed or socially-inculcated ideologies, they continue to wake early and trudge to their jobs for one single reason: Guilt. Throughout time religions have taken advantage of Man's guilt, a guilt experienced for no logical reason except that he unlike other animals is a self-aware being whose abstract thoughts conflict with the apparently practical, rational reality he finds himself a part of. We post-guilt NEETs will not bow to internal or external pressures encouraging us to sacrifice our contentment and sensitive dispositions for the sake of attaining money, or womenfolk. We alone stand proudly, detached from but keenly observant of the slave masses who yell at us for not being as unhappy as they are. We alone, we band of true men, defend our right to live a dignified life against those wishing to deprive of us of it. Yes you can mock, you can criticize, you can echo the demands your masters make upon you. But who is likely to regret their lives more? The noble and dignified NEETs who spend their truly precious time reading, pondering, philosophizing and engaging in critical, urgent debate online? Or the miserable, resentful masses, their eyes bloated and sagged by excess folds of skin, their hair falling out and their gums bleeding from stress, their bowels destroyed by a sedentary lifestyle spent at their desks clicking endlessly while their boss breaths down their necks? This is reality. This is 2016. We are the future.

The work is necessary, if we wish to maintain "civilization," but the specialization into jobs is not, particularly when more horizontal methods of organization would produce far better results much more quickly.

You didn't address the problem of legal property. The small minority you refer to doesn't consider what they do to be "work" anyway, so the category doesn't really apply there. The profitability of art is always a secondary consideration to an artist, otherwise they would be a wallpaper salesman.

The reason that not having toilet cleaning technology is unfair is that a who now spends 8 hours cleaning toilets could, with better technology, clean the same toilets in half that time with the right technology and have an extra 4 hours to himself.

in real life the janitor uses said technology to clean twice as many toilets in 8hrs and get paid the same as before. tech doesn't benefit the worker like that

Under conditions where the capitalists maintain absolute control over society, this would necessarily happen. (Not coincidentally, this is also what happeneds in slave economies: Whitney believed that his cotton gin would make life easier for the slaves. Just the opposite happened: slavery became more profitable and slaves were exploited even more viciously.)

But this is not inevitable. In a society where workers have enough political power to democratically control working conditions, a cap can be placed on how many hours a day a worker can labor. It sounds outlandish or even utopian in our society, where capitalists and financiers are the masters of mankind, but it was once completely normal for workers to toil 12 hours or more a day. But workers organized and fought back to limit the workday to 8 hours. Of course, if a worker actually works a 40hour workweek, with full benefits, vacation and weekends, he is considered extremely privileged. Things seems bleak, but workers struggled successfully for more leisure time before; we can do it again.

The photo is perfect. The figure is at leisure, and is free for a time to let his mind wander and appreciate what he is seeing. Let's imagine, without stretching credulity at all, that he is in a museum or an old public government building, where there are things worth seeing and appreciating.

What is the man perhaps appreciating, on his downtime, his weekend, his vacation, his retirement? The room itself? The functioning of a government? A painting? These are all products of /labor/.

So, put this way, leisure inevitably turns back towards an appreciation of labor. (You can throw a wrench in this by instead appreciating nature, the sunrise, etc.)

Stop listening to Peterson. You're spewing his drivel.

> he accuses neoliberalism
> he doesn't know what neoliberalism is

Neoliberalism is the bogeyman of the left as much as postmodernism and neomarxism, that of the right

Leisure time is an image economy of commodified experience - owing to a double-sidedness in the temporality of modern spectacle society. 1) the breaking down of time into empty, homogenous units (exchange value trumphing the authentic here-and-now, as well as making time consumable) 2) the pseudo-cyclical time of everyday (work-leisure, work-leisure, work-leisure).

Definition of leisure/'free time': ideological phantasmagoria of the material conditions of our modern spectacle society.

All I'm saying is that this whole talk of "all this new leisure and free time when work becomes superfluous" is spooky as fuck. Not discrediting the idea of a post-work society - in fact, I am all for it.
But it certainly won't be the result of technological 'progress' making spectacular capitalism obsolete - that is a spook that already died about a century ago.

Dude, do you remember what happened in 2008? It’s not ancient history. The 2008 financial crisis was, in essence the culmination of neoliberal capital. It’s not a joke meme like “cultural Marxism.” Here is a good, compact characterization of neoliberalism. therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=19420

Not the same user, but the problem here is in large part a matter of definition. What many leftists thinkers argue isn’t that work, per se, will disappear with the advent of AI, only that our particular form of capitalism, which includes features like wage labor; an employer/employee or capitalist/worker dynamic; etc., must either disappear or be radically transformed in order to live in a human society.

The problem with our current economic system in a nutshell is that the people with the money have all the power. The people with money direct the economy in directions that will make them money, even if that means that the vast majority of the global population must live in abject poverty.

The ideal economy is one in which only activities which are “productive” are supported, not activities that make a tiny stratum of the elite gobs of money while everyone else can go fuck themselves. This actually means that you would probably do as much work under an anarchist system as you would do under a capitalist system, only under an anarchist system, you and your community would keep the benefits you work for.

What do I mean by that? Well, by productive I mean you would only work to create actual necessities, in contrast to how our economy is currently run. An anarchist system would not tolerate a financial system that periodically destroys the global economy because a small handful of people decided it would be coolzies to play Russian Roulette with the financial system. Nor would it tolerate massive military budgets for weapons that can only serve aggressively purposes. Productive labor not only includes physical labor to produce or maintain goods and infrastructure (e.g. agriculture , housing, transportation, energy, sanitation etc.), but it also places an emphasis on the “production” of well socialized children. I firmly believe that we could solve most of society’s problems if we subsidized a parent or grandparent to raise children. It sounds expensive but it would dramatically reduce crime and other antisocial behaviors, including those promoted by neoliberal capitalism.

So yes, in a fair and humane society, work would be indispensable. But wage slavery would be abolished.

Found the capitalist

>I totally don't have depression btw

I'm sorry, but resorting to to sarcasm and ridicule has no effect on the contemporary NEET.

>Peterson recommends a book, therefore that book is invalid

You could have made this point much more clearly without your fancy pretentious words. Postmodern writers are shit.

I am using basic marxist vocab, boi. Ain't nothing postmodern about the situationists; in fact, they are often categorized as 'the last' / culmination of the modernist political avant-garde in 20th century Europe.

I have been reading on the subject. You guys should check David Frayne's The Refusal to work.

> is because a lot of this kind of labor is considered “women’s work.”

No, it's because reading a book or caring for your kids does not show in the GDP numbers. Also toilet-cleaning technology won't help the toilet cleaner unless he owns it. Automation is capital and capital benefits the capital owners who are not toilet cleaners.

Also, David Graeber is a hack.

>things they love and care about
>etsy bricabrac, light-up tables with N64 controller ports, charcoal sketches of Harley Quinn, origami sculptures based on origami tutorials, two-person cosplay outfits, geometric mustaches, jazz covers of Pantera songs, creative pumpkin lanterns, instagrams that always have an even number of posts, pop-up corgi kennels, korean Like bars, dragon tattoos, string cheese flavor generation, argyle, cool bedspreads

Wagecuckery is a spook

Finding some way of contributing to the world that you actually enjoy and are good at – whether it be writing, cooking, smithing, entrepreneurship etc – isn't

you should be able to find some level of work that meshes well with your desired lifestyle, not everyone has to work ninety hour weeks in finance

maybe fifteen hours of work per week or intermittent work every few months is your spot

>Graeber is a hack
Why?

>neoliberal capital
kek

Work will set you free.

Neoliberalism was an economic and social system prioritizing a revival of traditional liberal values combined with laissez-faire capitalist market principles.

While promising wealth and a general rise in welfare for the global population, it undermined social collectivist movements and union, furthered the wealth divide and destabilized many third world countries. This is because markets cannot and will not ever effectively regulate themselves. If you remove restrictions on companies and corporations they will use their new amassed wealth and power to further lobby for regulations that benefit them, and a capitalist system rewards the politicians that accept bribes.

And they're so wrong to like those things because the real thing they should like is to tool for bourgeois profits.

Also many of those things are heavily marketed, easy consumables. If given enough free time most people would prefer to learn, and produce things of value and benefit to themselves and their communities. But we come home after 10+ hours/day of working and commuting to eat the most readily available thing and try to rest for a moment before rinsing and repeating the next day.

My dude I've been trying to explain precisely this for the whole fucking last 18 months or so but these people simply refuse to listen, everything that isn't a rockwellian fantasy of the american dream is postmodernism and literally killing the white race

I think you're the one who doesn't know what neoliberalism is, my friend. I get that being american already gives you a huge socio-political handicap but it's never late too educate yourself.

>too educate yourself